As I handed round the course programme, written in both languages, I said, "OK, we'll be starting right away, with basic CQB. But first we want to take you on the ranges and make sure we're all together on our commands. We want to watch you firing, and see how you do things. This is as much for our benefit as for yours: we need to get to know your methods."
So we began, with magazine changes, stoppage drills and zeroing. Their weapon-handling proved to be good, although, as I'd suspected, some of the safety aspects wanted watching. We delivered a few bollockings on this score, especially after Sergei Two let off an AK47 round vertically into the air after he was supposed to have cleared his rifle.
Over the next few days, with basic range-work satisfactory, we began teaching the theory of house assaults, starting small, with two-man teams, making the students work in their pairs, showing them how to go through a room and clear it. We then moved on to four-man teams, through an assault on a single room to one on a house with four rooms and a corridor, still using one team. Then we progressed to having several teams operating together: eight or a dozen men entering different rooms at the same instant. Next came multi-floor tactics, with guys bursting in through doors, windows and skylights, all their movements precisely coordinated by radio.
At first we worked in classrooms, using magnetic boards and coloured counters to demonstrate formations, but soon we started moving men through actual rooms, and finally took them out for live firing practice in their primitive Killing House. The Russians were full of energy and enthusiasm, and they fairly threw themselves into the work. But what they lacked was precision: several times, when left to themselves to make a plan, they managed to have one assault team come face to face with another in the stair well, and we had to drum into them the vital importance of logical thought in command and control.
All this was interesting and good fun a challenge for both sides, and one that we all enjoyed. But the trouble was that, for me, the days began to slip away at an alarming speed. In no time at all it was Wednesday, then Thursday, then Friday. Our first week had almost gone, and we'd had no chance to recce either of our prospective nuclear sites.
The other aggravation was that on only the third night Rick did a runner. After supper he simply disappeared, and there were a few moments' panic before Mal, who was sharing a room with him, suddenly said, "I bet I know where he's at. He's gone to screw that woman he met on the recce. I heard him on the phone to her this morning."
"Not Natasha!" I said. Bloody hell! I knew he'd taken her address but I didn't realise he'd made contact again.
"Yeah laid himself on a taxi, too."
I wasn't going to sit up half the night waiting for the randy bastard to come back, and I never did hear what time he rolled in. But after breakfast I lit into him for taking off without letting me know what he was doing.
"Can't you see?" I told him.
"It's plain bloody stupid. If anything had happened to you we wouldn't have had a clue where you were. If you got picked up by the Mafia, for instance, the whole team would be in the shit."
He saw the point of that, and apologised, but I still warned him that if he couldn't control himself, I'd have to send him home.
Friendships quickly formed between the two sides, boosted on one occasion when Pete Pascoe, a great hunter-gatherer, returned from a run with a handful of brown mushrooms he'd collected in the forest. The sight of them brought vigorous protests from our own guys.
"For fuck's sake!" cried Whinger.
"Throw 'em out. Don't cook them, Mal, or you'll poison the lot of us." But when the students saw them they went ballistic.
"Beliye griby!" they shouted.
"Boletus mushrooms!" and rushed out to the spot where Pete had found them in search of more.
These were the best, most sought-after kind of fungus. Pete became a hero, and Anna confirmed that Russians are crazy about mushrooms.
"Weekends, at this time of year, thousands of Muscovites go hunting for them in the woods. They come out by train, car, everything. They're like locusts, and sweep the place clean. But the training areas are out of bounds to the public, so we're lucky."
The week also saw an amazingly rapid proliferation of swear words far worse than any Valentina had taught us. The strangest thing was the way each nationality began to curse in the other's language: very soon the Brits had adopted yob tvoio mat (fuck your mother) as their basic expression of disgust, and several of the Russians were giving brilliant imitations of Whinger's fir eking ell'. They'd started calling Dusty "Dostoievsky', and Johnny, with his high complexion, had immediately become "Svyokla' Beetroot.
After supper on Friday evening, before the weekend break, the students invited us round to their block for a drink. It was a strictly private affair, as drinking in barracks was totally forbidden even to officers. But somebody had slipped out for a few bottles of vodka and some cans of beer, and camaraderie flowered in an impromptu sing-song.
"I hope to Christ this isn't home-brewed," I said to Whinger as I downed a slug of vodka.
"Otherwise we may wake up blind."
I turned to Sergei Dva, holding up my glass, and said, "Not samogon?"
He looked outraged.
"Samogon?" he roared.
"Nyct! Almas! It is Diamond' and he grabbed a bottle to show me that it had a big white diamond, flashing reflected light, on its blue label.
Somebody produced an accordion, and it turned out that a man called Yuri had a phenomenal bass voice. To look at him you'd never have suspected it, because he was slim and wiry: the voice sounded altogether too big for such a spare frame, and seemed to come right from his boots. After a few pints of Baltika No. 6 — a powerful, dark brew he launched into the "Volga Boatmen's Song', and his mates joined in the choruses with terrific growls of "Ayee och-nyem, ayee och-nyem'. When Pavarotti hit back for the visitors with an impassioned rendering of "Drink to me Only', he won loud cheers.
As merry shouts shook the windows, I sat there sunk in the blackest thoughts. With a couple of exceptions, these Tiger Force guys were ordinary, lively fellows like ourselves. Too many people in Britain still had a Cold War image of the Russians, and thought of them as sinister, alien beings. Now, after a week in the country at grass-roots level, I saw that normal people, like us, had remained human in spite of all the horrors heaped on them.
They had their strengths and weaknesses, their good and bad points, the same as us. And an attack on Britain was the last idea that any of them would have entertained.
Nevertheless, the job had to be done and even as Sergei Three handed me another slug of Diamond I was saying to myself, "Right: the city centre recce's going down tomorrow night…"
SEVEN
When we next went to the Embassy, we left camp at the same time as on our first run, but this time we took just the black Volga. I hadn't told the Charge we were coming into town: officially, we were going out for a couple of drinks and a bit of a bar-crawl.
Whinger drove, I read the map, and in the back sat Pavarotti, alongside Toad, with his lock-picking kit and two spare padlocks for the cover of the shaft. I'd deliberately nominated Pay as my No. 2 in the tunneclass="underline" I'd told him I might well need his height and strength, and that he'd just have to overcome his phobia. We were all wearing civvies, but Pay and I carried thin, dark overalls to wear on top of our other clothes while we were underground.
The weather had turned wet, and rain glistened on the tarmac. We soon realised to our cost that the car's wiper blades were knackered, and created more smears than they removed; but once again the traffic was light and we made rapid progress. On the long, straight run in we turned off the highway a couple of times, waited in a side road then came back out, to make certain we didn't have a tail.